Newt and His Wives

It was pretty rich watching Newt Gingrich bursting with righteous indignation on Thursday night at the debate in South Carolina. He decreed it “as close to despicable as anything I can imagine” that moderator John King started the debate with a question about Gingrich’s second wife, Marianne, who (in an interview that ABC aired that night) stated that Gingrich had asked her for an “open marriage” and had hoped she would accommodate his six-year affair with his mistress—a congressional staffer twenty-three years his junior named Callista Bisek, who is now the third Mrs. Gingrich. “I am frankly astounded that CNN would take trash like that and use it to open a Presidential debate,” Gingrich said, fuming.

I am frankly astounded that Gingrich hasn’t been asked more about his various affairs and divorces—they are legitimate subjects for inquiry when you consider a) how merciless and, obviously, hypocritical he was when, as Speaker of the House, he was calling for Clinton’s head on a plate during Monicagate; and b) how sanctimonious he continues to be on the campaign trail, ranting about the encroachment of secular values into American life.

Though Gingrich raged about King’s question, calling it an instance of “the elite media protecting Barack Obama,” it is, in fact, conservative, religious voters who have been the most concerned by what they see as profound defects in Gingrich’s character and judgment. As I wrote in this week’s issue of The New Yorker, in a piece on Callista Gingrich, many evangelical voters are not satisfied with the candidate’s vague and not particularly remorseful-seeming statements about “past mistakes.” As Tony Evans, the senior pastor at the Oak Cliff Bible Fellowship in Dallas (who has a flock of nine thousand), said, “it’s not enough to just say, ‘Yeah, I did it.’” Evans told me that he advises his congregation, “You can look at the support of their current mate, and you can even find out in a sense from past mates if they think this person has changed and reformed—because they know them better than anybody.” It is likely, then, that his congregants would be interested in Marianne Gingrich’s assertion that her ex-husband “believes that what he says in public and how he lives don’t have to be connected.”

Mike Huckabee, the former governor of Arkansas, who won Iowa in the 2008 Presidential primaries with enormous support from religious conservatives, told me that he believed Gingrich’s penitence was real. But, he said, “I hear from friends who are conservative women who say, ‘I will not vote for Newt Gingrich.’ I say, ‘Why?’ ‘He’s walked out on two wives.’ And these are hard-core Republican women—conservative activists, women who put signs up in their yards, make phone calls. And they have bluntly said, ‘I will not vote for him.’ ”

Gingrich’s sister, Candace Gingrich-Jones, a gay-rights activist, also told me she would not vote for him. She added, “It’s not my place to judge anyone, but it’s frustrating as hell that there are people—my brother included—that are able to enjoy marriage equality more than once.”